You want to pick a fight? Call someone a racist. Few labels hit so hard or bring up so many deep feelings. It's a dark stain on someone's character. Then-Los Angeles police Detective Mark Fuhrman was accused at the O.J. Simpson trial of using racial epithets, and after Hurricane Katrina, rapper Kanye West said President Bush "hates black people."

According to Stanford law Professor Richard Thompson Ford of San Francisco, the national dialogue on race needs to change. In his recently published book "The Race Card," he argues that when people talk about race relations, they too quickly try to ferret out racism without looking at the larger issues. In doing so, they leave open the possibility that opportunists will unfairly paint someone as a racist to further their political ends, while de-legitimizing some very real problems.

"I decided to write the book out of dismay and frustration with the way questions of racial injustice are typically taken up," Ford says. "Right now, we tend to deal with questions of race and race relations in the context of scandal. There's not much conversation about the day-to-day issues with racial tensions and injustices."

Ford takes apart some of the more prominent recent scandals, such as the treatment of Hurricane Katrina victims and the dispute between hip-hop mogul Jay-Z and the makers of Cristal Champagne. He also digs into older ones, like the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Supreme Court confirmation hearings and the O.J. Simpson trial, to show how complicated events got reduced to screaming headlines.

Particularly, his chapter "Racism Without Racists" explores how inequities persist without obvious villains. He finds West's quote, for instance, to be factually incorrect, because housing segregation lies behind the suffering of black hurricane victims - and neighborhood segregation isn't the work of one racist. And the facts frequently complicate what appears to be a simple case of racism: The widely circulated nugget about a Hermes store closing when Oprah Winfrey tried to enter is simply not true. The store was closed for the day. But people were quick to draw upon actual occurrences of retail store discrimination in putting it out there that even Oprah is refused service because of her race. The story resonated, even if it wasn't accurate.

In a post-civil rights era, "the racism of the past affects relationships today." But how to find ways around this uncomfortable subject if we can't find and punish specific racist individuals? (Ford doesn't dispute the existence of "old-school racists," by the way. He just says there are fewer of them than before.)

Ford says the adversarial stance between races would be eased if we didn't rush to labels. "We have to get rid of some of the defensiveness," he says. "The fact that I'm bringing up a racial injustice doesn't mean we have to find a racist. Maybe if we treat it more like we treat environmental pollution - it's a crisis that we are all part of, but doesn't require us to issue moral condemnations in quite the same way."